Remember the picture that got away yesterday? Well, it came back!

As I was driving home from work tonight, heading west on State Street out of downtown Milwaukee and being blinded by the intense sunlight of the setting sun, I found myself sitting in relative shade at a stoplight at 20th Street. Idly curious to know whether that building could be seen now that I was about seven blocks west (the building that “dropped” below the skywalk bridge as I got closer because my iPhone camera couldn’t give me a long enough focal length from a distance where the building loomed above the skywalk), I glanced at my side-view mirror . . . and realized: WAIT. THERE IT IS!

I could see that building exactly as it looked yesterday when I was driving east, toward downtown!

To recap: Below is the picture I was able to take yesterday, with the arrow showing nothing more than the tippy-top of the roof of the building that had loomed so large in the what I initially saw and wanted to capture.

Here wss that same building sliding lower, beneath the skywalk, as I moved closer still.

But check out the photo I was able to get tonight. When I saw the brightly illuminated building in my side-view mirror, I grabbed my phone and tried for a close-up of that reflection. Which I was able to grab before the stoplight changed! Yay 🙂

I asked my buddy ChatGPT to explain how it could be. Why would my side-vew mirror be able to reflect a close-up view of those downtown buildings when actually “objects are closer than they appear,” as the text printed on those mirrors warn us? In my case, the downtown buildings appeared closer in the mirror and seemed larger than they were. How can that be?

ChatGPT gave me a physics/optics explanation involving formulas (formulae?) and diagrams. The gist of it all, I think, was that the convex lens of that side-view mirror captured a wide swath of the world and compressed that view into a relatively small area of its surface. Then I put my phone right up near the mirror and also zoomed in.

My phone wasn’t photographing the downtown buildings directly. It was photographing the mirror’s image of downtown—an image that was large in terms of the space it occupied on the mirror. And I was able to photograph that image from just a few inches away, so once I added the zoom to that closer proximity, I was able to get the shot.

My two-step process of side-view mirror reflection plus my iPhone was able to capture what otherwised would have needed a more powerful lens. In other words, although I didn’t create a telephoto lens, I accidentally found a way to reframe a distant scene through an intermediate optical image.

Isn’t that cool?

I still didn’t get exactly the shot I wanted, but if you can combine today’s image of the taller buidlings in the center behind the skywalk bridge with yesterday’s landscaped photo showing the brilliant, golden glow of sunset reflected on the Aurora Sinai skywalk and buildings, you can get the picture. (“Get the picture?” Pun not originally intended, but I kind of like it, so it stays 😀)